Currituck County Schools Media and Tech

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Central Students present to the BOE, originally uploaded by pgobriant.

Central Elementary fifth grade students in Ms. Taylor’s  and Ms. Huff’s classes have been studying weather patterns in class this year. Each day they check the forecast and weather maps and track the information with maps and charts. They use the Internet for their daily research. Three of the students, Mia, Jennifer, and Carrie, came to the November Board of Education meeting to show the Board members what they have been doing. They gave a great presentation using the Smart Board.

Below are some additional handouts that Donna Corbo and Candy Sample used at the NCSLMA conference last week.  These first four handouts outline the books within a series, in order.

Hank the Cowdog

Junie B. Jones

Nate the Great

Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter

Multicultural Resources pt. 1

Multicultural Resources pt. 2

Currituck County can be very proud of their Media personnel. We had four people presenting sessions at the North Carolina School Library Media Association Conference this year.

Candy Sample (Griggs) and Donna Corbo (CCMS) gave a presentation on “What every new Media Specialist need to know.” The presentation was filled with great tips and strategies. It was very well received by all in attendance. Their handouts are linked below.

Top Ten Tips for Media Specialists

Resources for Media Specialists

Native American Month

Hispanic Heritage Resources

Asian Pacific American Resources

African American Literature

Survival for Media Specialists

Mary Simmons and Beth OBriant (CCHS) gave a presentation titled “Lucy and Ethel beat the overdue blues.” They shared some of the innovative and fun strategies they use to encourage students to return overdue books.

This week I had an experience that illustrates the impact technology, and particularly video games, are having on how we experience the world. I received the new Motor Trend magazine this week. It includes an article on the new Nissan GT-R which is scheduled to be released in the US next year. This car is obviously out of my price range but it is fun to read about.

My son Timothy was walking through the living room as I was reading the article and I shared it with him. I thought he would be excited to hear about it since we had discussed it previously. Instead he said, “Yeah, I know. I’m driving it upstairs.” Turns out the Play Station 3 game Gran Turismo 5 includes the car as one of the choices. It was included when the game was released but it was not unlocked for play until the day the car was actually unveiled. So while I was reading a magazine and looking at pictures he was having a very different experience. He was using a steering wheel, pedals, and a big screen TV to experience the car from the driver’s seat. Wow.

Our 21st Century students expect experiences that are interactive and engaging. How do we meet this need in our classrooms?

Spam is both an annoyance and a danger.  We have a spam filter installed on our network to look at all the email that comes into our system.  Currently 80 - 90% of the email that comes into our system is either blocked as spam or “tagged” with a bulk tag.  We regularly fine tune the spam filter to improve its ability to identify spam.  Even so, a good deal of unwanted email makes it through the filter and into your mail box.

If you don’t recognize the From: address the safest thing to do is delete the email without opening it.  If you do open email from an unknown user you should NEVER click on any links in the message.  Some of these links download unwanted software and viruses.

The following tips can help you avoid spam.  These tips were taken from Mount Holyoke College.

• Try to avoid listing your email in public. Once it is public, it becomes a target for spam.
• Do not respond to unsolicited email; this alerts an organization that may have randomly hit your email address that the account is active and may subject you to further emails, some of which may not even appear to come from the same place.
• Spammers can get addresses from jokes, pleas for emails going to a sick person, or any other forwarded email with a list of addresses. Do not forward such lists; if there is content in the email you wish to forward, cut that content and paste into a new email without forwarding all those addresses. This avoids inadvertently sending your friend’s address(es) back to the person collecting them.

We have a new training room in Currituck County.  A storage room at The Knapp School has been converted into a conference room/computer lab that is called the Knapp Professional Learning Center.  See pictures below.  Several groups have used the room this year.  This past week it was used for NCWISE Getting Started Workshops for Currituck, Pasquotank, and Perquimans.  There are 18 computers, making a mini-lab that can be used for staff development without displacing students from a lab.  School groups can sign up to use room through the Central Office.